Editorial: Spiraling migrant crisis, not Gaza, needs full City Council attention

Even as news broke about a 5-year-old boy, Jean Carlos Martinez Rivero, dying at a Pilsen shelter, the City Council’s Committee on Health and Human Relations spent hours Monday listening to a dozen carefully chosen speakers all calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. What will be the impact of that resolution, should it pass the full council, on the actions of either Hamas or Israel?

Zero.

We, too, would like to see much better civilian protections in Gaza and an end to the loss of innocent life. But this particular hearing was both a distraction from a crisis and a performative sham: There was scant mention of the horrors of the Hamas atrocities. This complicated crisis requires nuance, an understanding of history and the engagement of both sides, all present within Joe Biden’s administration but absent at City Hall. Israel still is dealing with the worst trauma in generations; this hardly is the moment to make most Jewish Chicagoans feel less safe.

No wonder the Chicago Jewish Community Relations Council called the resolution from their own elected representatives “reckless, irresponsible and dangerous.”

You might say that of how this administration has handled the migrant crisis, which seems to be spiraling further out of control as the holidays approach.

Venezuelan migrants living in the Pilsen shelter have told the Chicago-based, nonprofit Borderless Magazine they are being treated “like dogs” in Chicago’s largest migrant shelter, a former warehouse now home to more than 2,000 migrants. They described little “dust and fiber-like particles” falling from the ceiling, dirty bathrooms, limited and spoiled food and, overall, cots shoved together and becoming a hotbed of infections.

Borderless reported another telling allegation in its piece, republished by Block Club: “Staff have barred migrants from recording or taking photos inside the shelter and ‘threatened’ to kick migrants out if they speak with members of the media.”

Why the attempt at muzzling the freedom of speech of folks who have traveled to the United States to take advantage of that very thing?

We all know why: Neither the private contractors like Favorite Staffing nor the city want close scrutiny of what is actually going on inside a shelter that was supposed to house 1,000 migrants but now handles more than twice that number. For an administration that has claimed a commitment to transparency, that’s outrageous.

Cameras should be welcomed, and shelter residents who choose to speak to anyone they want should be free to do so.

Remember the state’s impressive emergency medical facility set up at McCormick Place during the COVID-19 crisis? There was a news conference to show the media the care behind, and cleanliness of, the facilities. Why should this time be any different?

We understand the difficulty of this cascading crisis for this city; time and again this page has called for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to stop this inhumane busing without notice, and for the federal government to face up to its responsibilities at the border, however politically toxic.

But job one now in Chicago has to be about making conditions on the ground better for these folks, not about trying to deflect responsibility.

Alas, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s biggest worry appears to be about who is getting the blame and working to make sure it is not him.

“They’re just dropping off people anywhere. Do you understand how raggedy and how evil that is … and then you want to hold us accountable for something that’s happening down at the border?” an angry mayor told reporters on Monday, as the Tribune reported.

No, Mr. Mayor, we don’t hold you accountable for the border. But, given your elected office, we do hold you accountable for what is happening at a shelter in Pilsen.

And the Tribune story of what happened to the migrant boy, a narrative of a family that apparently could not get the help it needed quickly enough, is harrowing to read, including as it does allegations of a feverish child without warmth or enough to eat, days of sickness going mostly unnoticed, and parents not being allowed to ride in the ambulance and then suffering the indignity of being patted down at the hospital rather than being allowed to be with their son at what turned out to be his final moments.

All this just before Christmas. What a welcoming city we have become.

One might think the alderman representing Pilsen would have spent Monday working to improve the situation. Instead, 25th Ward Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez spent much of the day at the committee meeting on the Gaza resolution, thundering about “genocide” and “apartheid” in Gaza — 6,000 miles away. A perfect encapsulation of how this ideologically obsessed group of progressives would prefer to deal only with issues of their choosing rather than the urgent local matters immediately before them.

If this were happening, if a child had died under those circumstances, on the watch of either of the two previous mayors, the outrage from immigrant-service organizations on the left would have been deafening.

They’ve been co-opted by this administration, of course.

It’s time they found their voices nonetheless.

As we’ve said before, City Hall must get a better handle on logistics, and it has to deal with Austin, however difficult that might be. Lashing out at easy targets achieves nothing.

Take, for example, a city ordinance that passed last week allowing the city to tow and impound so-called “rogue” buses that don’t deliver asylum-seekers to the city’s designated “landing zones” within the assigned windows. Last Wednesday night, a bus was indeed towed and impounded.

A good idea in theory. But in practice, the ordinance just made things worse.

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Unsurprisingly, private bus operators didn’t care to see their vehicles towed away, or for being blamed for their companies being fined $3,000, so they starting hiding their activities even more blatantly, sending migrants to the suburbs or arriving when and where they would not be easily seen. What little communication had previously existed diminished even further, Cristina Pacione-Zayas, Johnson’s deputy chief of staff, told the Tribune. The “landing zone” is now being ignored. Unintended consequences strike again.

The problem with the ordinance is that it targets the wrong villain. All kinds of entities are making a buck off a crisis costing Illinois taxpayers millions of dollars, whether it’s staffing shelters or chartering buses. The problem here is flowing from the state of Texas, not a guy driving a bus and trying to make decisions on the fly without getting fired.

The problem, of course, is that there is no line of communication between Chicago (or Springfield) and Austin.

One has to be established. Whatever has to be done. And in the meantime, these shelters have to be improved immediately.

There are no other solutions and, as we all know now, lives are at stake.

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